Aspects of the disclosure relate to financial transactions conducted with portable consumer devices such as a payment card. In particular, one or more aspects of the disclosure relate to providing incentives for financial transactions that include a health benefit.
As the importance of healthy foods becomes increasingly realized, individuals and organizations in the public and private sectors have a desire to encourage people to purchase more healthy food items, such as fruits and vegetables. However, as healthy food items are often more expensive to purchase compared to “junk foods,” it is difficult to incentivize individuals to purchase the healthy food items. It would also be costly, time-consuming, and inefficient for retail stores, grocery stores, and various vendor locations to process separate transactions after manually distinguishing the various categories under which the purchase items fall. As merchants are often concerned with convenience, ease of transacting business, and quickness of the transaction, it is difficult to implement a system that can incentivize healthy food purchases while providing convenience and efficiency in payment processing at the same time.